“I’m gonna give you a number in Jersey.”
***
After watching Filargi cross Madison Avenue and start up the street toward his hotel, Charley turned the Chevy van into the traffic and went north to Sixty-second, then turned off again to go across town to the East River Drive, down to the Brooklyn Bridge, then to the St. Gabbione Hotel Laundry. Irene was right, in her way. She wasn’t able to see the big picture, but if she wasn’t right she had right on her side. The Prizzis had agreed to what it would cost them to get back Filargi. They had to live up to that. They were going to get a bank for practically nothing so they had to understand that they had committed for certain expenses to get the bank, and that they had to pay for their commitments.
He would lay it out to Pop, who had been in on the commitments every step of the way. Then he and Pop would call the don and go over to see him and get the whole thing straightened out. He was proud of Irene. It took a lot of moxie to stand up like that. He had himself a tremendous woman. He knew that. Pop knew that. It was time that it was laid out for Don Corrado.
Pop was looking out the window when Charley come into his office. He turned around in the swivel chair as he heard the door open.
“Hey, Charley!” he said. “You ready to take things over?”
“Yeah,” Charley said. “I almost forgot.”
“Who is going to be your Underboss?”
“You’re the
consigliere
, what do you think?”
“You make your pick, Charley, then I’ll tell you if I agree. You got to make the decisions now.”
“We’ll move up Sal Prizzi.”
“Good.”
“Pop, I got to talk to you.”
“What’s up?” Pop asked.
“Pop, it’s simple. Irene wants her money like the don agreed when he got the letter from me when I had Filargi.”
“She wants her money?”
“She wants what is coming to her. She even can see that there is no chance at the insurance money for Filargi, even though the family agreed to pay that. She is willing to forget the rest of the contract Vincent put out and, if absolutely necessary, her money for the Filargi stand. But she wants the five hundred and forty back. She has to have it by five o’clock today.”
“Five hundred and forty?”
“The money she had to pay back to the don.”
“But three hundred sixty of that is Prizzi money.”
“It was, but we had Filargi. The don wanted Filargi and that was a part of the price.”
“Charley—where have you been?”
“What do you mean?”
“The don made you the Boss. How could there be more than that? That is going to like pay off ten, fifteen times more than the Filargi thing and she is your wife.”
“Pop,
I
know that. But Irene wants her cut. She sees Vincent’s job as my end and, anyway, she has no way of figuring what Vincent’s end can make. And if she did know it, she wouldn’t believe it because the Prizzis and everybody else in her life have always shortchanged her.”
“There is no way we can pay her, Charley.”
“Pop, I am asking you to see this from Irene’s point of view. I mean, it’s like she’s looking back on her whole life when she says we have to pay her. It was a crappy life, Pop, until she took over from all the people who told her what to do. And what did they tell her? They said she was nothing, but she knew better.
She knew she was as good as they were. She climbed out of Chicago. They fixed her up with a great job in Chicago peddling her ass so she could split what she made on her back. She took on the slobs and the pimples and the stink so they could make fifty percent off her. She quit. She got books on bookkeeping out of the fucking library so she could understand numbers, then she went back to Chicago and got a job pushing a pencil for the main wire. They paid her nothing, but she learned how to talk and what dresses to wear and she talked numbers to them until they saw she was a great-looking head and that she could be trusted and they made her a courier for three families. But while she sat in those airplanes, back and forth, back and forth, she studied books on income taxes. Irene was always ready, but nobody ever paid her her end. So she went in where they lived. She opened up as a contract hitter and we know the rest, but they never let her in. They still paid her nothing compared to what they got out of what she did. And now—now—she has delivered for the Prizzis on every count. It was her moves that got Filargi out of that hotel, not mine. She handled everything that happened out of nowhere with fast decisions, so we were right every time. We got Filargi and that is going to make the Prizzis seventy million dollars. She paid them back the money out of the Vegas scam which meant they got paid twice, once from her and once from the insurance companies, but the don still whacked her with a fifty-percent penalty for getting her to double his money. What the fuck, Pop. We are always talking about honor so we have to pay off Irene for every cent we promised her we would pay her.”
“There is no way we can pay her, Charley.”
“Well, Pop, with all respect, I have to hear that from the don.”
Angelo picked up the telephone on his desk and dialed a number. “Amalia?” he said into the phone. “Angelo. Charley and me got to see the don today.”
“The only way you can do that,” she said, “is you come over for lunch.”
***
Lunch at Don Corrado’s, which didn’t begin that day until 2:30, while Charley and his father waited for the call from Amalia because of the don’s overlong nap, lasted until a quarter to five. Charley was almost distraught thinking about Irene’s ultimatum—that she have the money by five o’clock or she would leave him—but the don would not speak of business that day while they ate. At last the two old men sat in the Morris chairs and Charley sat in a straight-backed chair facing them.
“You tell me what you have on your mind,” Don Corrado said, “then I will tell you what I have on mine.”
“
Padrino
,” Charley said, “we delivered Filargi to you in the best of good faith. It was agreed at the time that if I agreed to give Filargi to you, that my wife would be paid her fee for doing her stand as second man, and that the five hundred forty dollars would be returned to her. With respect, on her behalf, I am asking for that money now.”
Don Corrado and Angelo Partanna stared at him sadly.
“I am saying that we will forget the rest of the entire piece of money, a very big piece of money, but the return of the five hundred forty—that she’s got to get back. It was all okayed by you and she’s got to have it back.”
“Charley,” Don Corrado said gently, “there is a very good reason why she hasn’t been paid. The Grand Council decided last night that we must give the second man on the stand to the cops.”
Charley looked with horror from Don Corrado to Angelo Partanna. “Give her to the cops?” he said thickly. The words were like razor blades in his throat.
“Listen, Charley,” Don Corrado said, offering him the comfort of his alligator eyes, “last night the Grand
Council, speaking for all the families in this country under a system which we have all accepted for fifty years, told me I had one week to give up whoever killed the woman who pushed the wrong floor or to find myself at war with every family in this country. The Grand Council sent Bavosi and Lingara here last night to tell me that. Do you know what a war would cost us? It could cost us our life as a family. It could cost us all of our people and everything we have. Nothing else can have any meaning to any of us except the family who made such a good life for us in America.”
“What do you want me to do?” Charley said.
“You have to do the job on her, Charley. You are the only one who can get close enough to her to do it,” his father said.
“Zotz her? Clip Irene?”
“You are thinking that Ed’s fixers can get her off and that she could be given to the police alive,” Don Corrado said. “But I have never seen them like this. The FBI is in it because it was a kidnaping. If they get her alive they will make her talk and if she talks she will drag all of us to prison. Maybe even to the chair. She would talk because she would have to talk. When she talks, then you, me, Angelo, and Ed will all be nailed. Filargi will go free. We will never get the bank back. There is no choice, Charley. The existence of the Prizzi family is in your hands.”
“But how will clipping Irene ever satisfy the cops about the woman who pushed the wrong floor?”
“Filargi will identify her body as the one who shot that police captain’s wife. There will be no one to question. They will have what they asked for and we can all go back to doing business.”
“But she is my
wife
,
Padrino
.” Charley’s voice broke.
“She is your wife, we are your life,” his father said. “Tell us your answer, Charley.”
“One woman who you have known for less than two months, or your family which is your life,” Don Corrado said.
Charley felt that he must be drowning. He wouldn’t have anything left if he did what they were asking him to. What else did he have except Irene? How could he do the job on the only person he loved? Everybody else—Pop, his job, the family—that was all only an automatic thing that had been massaged into him, beaten into him, fed and coaxed into him every day of his life. It was a Sicilian’s instinct to feel that way about those things. But Irene was his need, she was the emotion on which his life rested. She was all the things that made him a man. She was the only important thing in his life.
Maybe he would get old. Pop and Don Corrado had made it somehow. What would he have when he got old if he did what they wanted? He would have a pile of money in a Swiss bank. He would have houses, and people, and cars, and power—not his but on loan to him. He would have more respect and still more respect. He would have quick-eyed men like the Plumber and Cucumbers Cetrioli around him wherever he went and he would shrivel up inside from the endless talk of sports and odds and fixes. He would go dead and dry because for every minute of every day until he was dying he would remember what he had done to the only meaning of his life. He would have killed more than Irene’s body, he would be wasting both of their immortal souls. He would be passing a sentence upon himself to spend the rest of his life inside a 230-pound cake of ice. That was the bad part. If he blew Irene away he would be alone. No one could take her place. All his life he had never stopped looking, like everybody else, hoping to find that perfect match-up, edge to edge, of his body, mind, and spirit, and when he had found Irene he knew he had done it,
that they were chemical complements, and could make each other safe forever.
What was the Prizzi family next to that? What was all of his life—apart from Irene—next to that? In his mind he stared blankly into her sweet, serene face as it smiled at him, completing him, saving him, and he knew that, no matter what she meant to him, because he had been formed by the history of the people he came from, by his father and Don Corrado, to become what he was, even though Irene was one being with him in his business—which was his life, too—even though she was the woman who was his mother and his lover and his partner all at the same time, he would be even more alone if he turned his back on his family than if he did what they were asking him to do. The family were what he had been since Sicily started breeding people. They were his food. They had been with him forever. There were hundreds of thousands of them, most of them ghosts, some of them bodies. They were all staring at him, waiting to know what he would do. He couldn’t do it. They couldn’t expect him to do it. How could he be the final one to cheat her out of her life the way her father had done it, the way the mob had done it? He would be the last of all of them to put her through the hoop. But the last one. She would never be able to start up again the way she always had done it. He would be finishing her courage. And in the few seconds before he could do it, he would see all of that in her eyes because, no matter what else, she trusted him and she knew he loved her. He wanted to drown.
“I will give her to you,” Charley said to them.
“It’s business, Charley,” his father said. “You know it’s only business.”
“Well—we can’t set her up without that money,” Charley said. “She has everything going on that money.”
“Then you’ll bring her the money,” Don Corrado
said. “It’s in the same little case. It’s under my bed. Bring it out, Charley.”
Charley went across the room and got down on his hands and knees beside the big bed. He pulled a traveling case out and brought it to the don.
“Open it, son,” Don Corrado said.
Charley unsnapped the clasps and opened the lid. Packages of thousand-dollar bills were stacked inside. “That’s the five hundred forty dollars,” Don Corrado said. “If that’s what she wants, show it to her.”
“Where you gonna take her?” Pop asked.
“She left for California.” He couldn’t look at them so he kept looking at the money. “She told me if I wasn’t back at the beach with the money by five o’clock that she would leave for California.”
“All right,” Don Corrado said with finality. “After you take the stone out of my shoe, leave her in a rent-a-car at the airport, then call Angelo and tell him where. He’ll tell the New York cops and they’ll call the LA cops, then she can be photographed and they can show the pictures to Filargi in the slammer and he can tell them that she is the hitter who did the job on the woman who pushed the wrong floor and the wind will stop blowing. We can all get back to our business again.”
Chapter Forty-four
By the time Charley got to the bottom of the stairs at the Sestero house, leaving the grimness of his father and Don Corrado two floors above, his body and mind felt as if they had been flash-frozen. He had spent his life with those two old men and he had carried out their devious and brutal orders as the ordinary course of his job, but although he spun around and around in his head what they had just told him to do, he could not make the jagged parts of it fit into any recognizable, coherent pattern. They had assigned him to do the job on his own wife, as if that were something that the
fratellanza
did every day. He was now the Boss of the Prizzi family and the first job they handed him was to kill his own wife. Charley had been brought up to believe that, no matter how vicious things got in business, the women were safe from it. That was the primary point of honor of the whole thing. No matter what you did for money, you never did the job on women—certainly never on your own women.